Hugo to Hexo

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I have been using Hugo to blog for quite sometime. I recently pulled an all nighter to migrate from Hugo to Hexo.

Old Look

I was using cocoa-hugo-theme. I loved its simplicity. I also contributed few things to the theme itself.

  1. Pull request for showing tags
  2. Feature request - Dark mode
  3. Feature request - Telegram Icon

Hugo home page
hugo quotes page
Hugo books page
Hugo blog post
Hugo code syntax

New Look

One of the things that strongly convinced me to move to hexo was this theme called cactus. It is perfect and it is everything that I am expecting it to be.

hexo home page
hexo quotes page
hexo books page
hexo blog post
hexo code syntax

Reasons

Here are my reasons for this migration.

  1. I find hexo to be simple and good enough for my needs.
  2. Themes - cocoa VS cactus :: Winner is cactus and I was having hard time porting cactus to Hugo!
  3. Hugo’s documentation felt complex with terms like archetypes. On the other hand, Hexo’s documentation was simple and to the point. Hugo might have few features which comes with the complexity in the documentation. But I am sure that, I wouldn’t need them at this point of time.

Lessons

An important lesson I learnt is to avoid using pictures with transparent background in blog posts. Because, some parts of the pictures might become invisible when migrating the site from light to dark theme. (Example: black lines drawn with a transparent background render correctly on a site with white background and seems invisible when it is used in a site with black background)

Other options

I started evaluating various tools when I started this site.

Hosted Platforms

  • Medium :: I felt Medium is not a place for posting something very personal and small. Because there weren’t much of an audience for my personal posts and the upvote system kind of made my posts look like spam.
  • Posthaven :: not free $5 + I think it has problem with rendering code snippets. It is suited more for saying personal experiences.
  • Tumblr :: More suited for sharing personal experiences.
  • Wordpress :: Not free.
  • Notion :: This is not a blogging platform, but I use it to keep my private journals. It fits that space perfectly and I checked if it is possible to host a public blog with notion. I asked around and seems like it is not possible yet, but the notion team added my vote on this feature request.

notion feature request

Static site generators

  • Jekyll :: I don’t want to fiddle with ruby, gem, bundler etc. So, nope!
  • Hugo :: I have to confess something here. I did Hype-driven development while choosing Hugo and it satisfied my needs perfectly at that point of time.
  • Gatsby :: This is new and has cool features (https://www.gatsbyjs.org/features/), which I won’t need as of now. So I will say pass for now.

This is a very interesting topic. I am always on a look out for new blogging tools and platforms.